Booting Linux in Less Than 1 Second in AllWinner A10 Devices? Yes! You Can!

threewater, a Chinese developer, has just posted a very interesting demo on linux-sunxi mailing list showing a device based on AllWinner A10 boot linux within 0.85s, and if you add a Qt app, the total time is just about 1.2s.

This appears to be a custom hardware (EM6000), but we do know it’s based on AllWinner A10, comes with 512 MB RAM, and 4GB NAND Flash. On the software side, the device runs kernel 3.4 from linux-sunxi, with a customized version of uboot, a squashfs rootfs, and a Qt 4.7.4 app showing a gauge. Both the rootfs (7MB) and the kernel (2MB) have been compressed with LZO. All that boots from NAND flash for optimal speed.

The 1.2 second time includes kernel + rootfs + app time, and the total time is a bit longer, but this is still impressive. Here’s the boot log:

This is not the first time, people have implemented ultra fast boot on ARM hardware, an example is a ~400ms boot on the Beagleboard, but it’s still nice to see what can be achieved thanks to developers’ communities such as linux-sunxi.

The complete details and/or binary files are not available at this time, but if you are interested in Linux fast boot, you may considering checking Adeneo Embedded presentation at ELCE 2012 who did something very similar on Freescale i.MX51 & i.MX 6Q hardware.

[…] Linux booting in under 1 second on an Allwinner A10-powered device The Allwinner A10 is an ARM Cortex-A8 single core processor. It’s not exactly fast… but with the right software, you can boot a very simple operating system in less than a second. Don’t expect to do this with a full Ubuntu desktop Linux OS anytime soon. [CNX Software] […]

That’s great, but it’s almost certainly being achieved at the cost of flexibility. It sounds like everything is in the compressed rootfs. So no mounting of a r/w filesystem, no starting of daemons, no handling of dynamic devices (i.e udev). Is it even bringing up a network interface?

So, perfect for an “appliance”, like an industrial control panel. But don’t expect your desktop or media player to boot this fast.

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